Strikes

Feilding Star, Volume VI, Issue 93, 20 January 1885, Page 2

Strikes

«. . The following remarkable aud plainspoken letter ought to be read with interest by persons who are inclined to take a dispassionate view of the contest between Capital and Labor which has gone on for so many years. One result of the battle has been that the position of Labor is considerably improved by being able to bring Capital against Capital by the formation of Trades Unions and Protection Societies, under a variety of names. Whether the Capital suppled by small contributions of the many is wisely employed in combatting the Capital of the feWy is a question we are not now going to discuss, but we think tho views of Sir Edmund Beckett, as representing the latter, given in a letter to the Times in reply to a " Unionist," are worthy of attention : — " What is true of farming is true of every other trade. Shipbuilding, after being hunted about by unionism from one port to another, is finally extinct, like wolves. House - building costs' two and three times as much as it did within living memories, and it no longer pays to build anything but bad houses, and working men wonder that their rents are high. Clock and watch making, is vanishing here more and more yearly, as I predicted nearly forty years ago. It is needless to pursue the catalogue, when even beer hardly pays to brew, except under special advantages, which used to be thought "as safe as the bank," and iron is become dross, and traders aspire to fix their own prices for railways to carry their goods at. One of the unionistic nostrums is to stop competition, only they dp not know how to do it. It is.eftsy to prove that protection would do your own business good,but then everybody else wants free trade against you ; and . so those Kilkenny cats may be left to fight it out among themselves. The other remedy which the "Unionist" points out as [ a measure which Parliament ought favorably to consider is the payment of wages beyond profits out of taxation — that is, to make you and me pay for something that we do not want at all, and which nobody wants, at the wages that 1 are demanded for it. Democracies and other tyrants have done that before now. Every candle can be burnt at both ends, and universal darkness produced all the sooner. Unions, and unionistic principles which prevail over a still wider area, decree tKat workmen should rather starve j than do a stroke more work for their ! wages .than they think right. They pretend to want work, but they do not ; they want work at their own price and for their own time and no other ; and they vow and enact vengeance in one way or another against every free; trading workman who really wants work at the price which people can afford to give. If we are f oolish enough and mischievous enough to pay; them for begging instead of working, as ' as Archbishop Whateuby said, the delusion will last somewhat longer, but not much. Unionism has had its inningc, and made a pretty big score. Now the laws of nature are beginning to have theirs, and are not going to be put out either by clerical or unionistic bowlers. They may .knock down the wickets and -steal the bats, but they' l will not win the game. Perhaps, eccle- j siastics' might preach a little on the Tenth Commandment and on the connection of idleness and want with more advantage than 'on confidence in the aspirers after other people, s goods."